Welcome to Budapest! Sign welcoming tourists halfway submerged in the Danube as the river flooded with peak levels at Budapest over the weekend.

Budapest officials said Sunday that record flooding from the Danube River will likely be contained, while thousands of volunteers and emergency workers rushed to continue fortifications.

The Danube River, which runs through downtown Budapest, is expected to peak Sunday night at around 9 meters, three times higher than its usual level. The water level was at 8.88 meters by early afternoon, already some 0.35 meters higher than the last registered record.

Dikes — many of which were newly built or reinforced over the past week as the city braced for the flood — will hold, authorities say.

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“The flood wave is nearing the country’s heart, and a decisive two days are coming because the most lives and the most valuable assets are in Budapest. We have to collect all our strength now,” said Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has been heading the flood prevention efforts for the fourth day in a row, on Sunday.

Kinga Brezina, 42, a holistic fitness teacher, organized her course participants through Facebook and spent Saturday afternoon packing sandbags in various areas of the city. “We had wanted to hold a day-long celebration, with dancing, eating cake and having fun, but decided, instead, to do something for the community,” said Ms. Brezina, a mother of two small children.

Ms. Brezina and her friends crashed at her place after spending the afternoon fortifying dikes on Hajogyari Island, which is home every year to Europe’s biggest week-long non-stop party and concerts, Sziget Festival , which draws some 400,000 youths from all over the continent annually.

Friendships were formed quickly among strangers while they filled sandbags and stacked them, with what some described as an almost summer-camp like feeling. Fellow volunteers purchased bottled water and sandwiches for the group when they took a break.

“After working for four hours in a single stretch, you come to this impasse that you’d want to do nothing else but sit down and rest, but you just keep on shoveling the sand into the bags. I got so tired that I,” hurt myself in the end, Ms. Brezina said.

Volunteers are travelling from far and wide outside Budapest to help, and even school-children are out on the dikes doing what they can. People living at or near the potential flood area have been busy getting prepared for the possible deluge.

“There is no panic, everyone is just getting ready. If we get flooded, life will stop here. Shoppers are busy at the [local grocery store] CBA, stocking up,” said public relations expert Szilvia Fulop at Kismaros, a popular holiday site and a short drive north of Budapest.

The flooding hasn’t taken any lives in Hungary yet, but several thousand people had to evacuate and leave their homes and belongings behind.

The flood water stood two meters high in the house of Edo Kollar, a graphics and tattoo artist. She started out by living in a tent when she was evacuated Wednesday, but is now staying with friends.

“The gas-filled double glazed windows will need to be replaced, they will break under the water pressure, and the whole place will need to be re-decorated. The kitchen cabinets will crash onto the granite kitchen top and break it. It will take two to three months for the house to dry, depending on the weather and we’ll have to fight the mold. And we have no insurance,” Ms. Kollar said.

Insurance firms refuse to insure construction such as Ms. Kollar’s small, one-story brick house that was built on a potential flood plain even though it was built with a permit. Moving is not an option as a piece of real estate in such a location would fetch very little, Ms. Kollar said. However, establishing more permanent flood prevention and a regular deepening of the Danube’s bottom would help to prevent this from happening, she said.

Businesses are also dealing with the floods — some seeing a surge in business, while others are forced to close due to the waters.

“We’ve seen business thriving, the number of guests are as high as over the weekends” this past week, said waitress Kriszta Nagy, 25, at a popular pancake shop Nagyi Palacsintazoja, in Batthyany Square. However, the square was flooded Saturday night with overflowing rainwater from the city’s drainage system which could no longer dump into the Danube. The square was closed off for pedestrians by Sunday afternoon.

Attila Bognar, co-owner and manager of A38, a permanently moored former Soviet-type freight ship converted into a popular Budapest restaurant, exhibition site, and a concert venue on the Danube, had to close shop until the flood recedes, at a considerable cost. They had to cancel or move scheduled concerts such as U.S. band Airbourne’s concert Thursday elsewhere, send employees home and spend twice on the ads.

“Only two sailors are left now on the ship, who permanently live there, they now are in their element. They are monitoring the water and try to protect the ship from any damages,” Mr. Bognar said. The high-speed flood waters may bring debris and could damage the ship. A previous flood once carried a complete wharf into the concert boat’s path.

Japanese car maker Suzuki Motor Corp.’s Hungarian manufacturing unit will not open on Monday due to the floods impeding its employees from making it to work, spokeswoman Viktoria Ruska told the online edition of Hungarian daily Nepszabadsag.

“I wanted to see how community media works, how it assigns a reason to something it has no information of at all,” Mr. Juhasz, performance artist, told the B+P blog site. Mr. Juhasz wants to collect all the comments and pictures of his performance and organize an exhibition of them.

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